TripAdvisor Reviews Janna's B&B Irkutsk

Travel Blogs from Irkutsk

... 20 for both of us. It was a very bizarre journey, the highlight being when the person sitting next to Wills decided to have a nap on him most of the way.

There is a museum about lake Baikal that we went to. It is pretty difficult walking round a museum when you do not understand a single word anything says. The best part about it was seeing the Baikal seals (or Nerpas). They looked like a normal seal that has been blown up like a beach ball and are only found ...

... spent in Laike Baikal were frustratingly defined by a lack of sleep which we put down to Train Lag and an apparent infantile need for the movement of the train to rock us to slumber town. Indeed, this phenomenon was certainly not aided by the bizarre fact that all the stops are listed in Moscow time and all the stations have Moscow time on their boards no matter how far East you go. The further we progressed the more absurd this appeared as we were, towards the ...

... the part of Russia that the Decemberists were exiled to following one or another revolution, and was originally the border between Russia and China. The town was mainly wooden buildings, and now about half of them remain (although they are not in the best condition). The plaques that are next to some of the key places (e.g. Monuments and cathedrals) regularly talk about the building being damaged in the great fire of 1927 or restored after the fire of 1921, etc. Seems ...

... across the barren tundra of Siberia, we boarded the train in Vladivostok.

The experience from that point on was somewhat surreal- The tiny cabin that was to be our home for the next week would make a phone booth seem excessively spacious. There were two narrow benches that folded down into beds, a small table, a big window coated in mud... and that was about it. Washroom was at one end of the car and was shared with our Russian neighbours (a big hit with DH). Despite ...